Page 48 of The Fall-Out

‘That us being friends means we’re not more than friends.’

The mouthful of burger I was eating suddenly felt too big to swallow.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No,’ I agreed sombrely. ‘Probably not.’

His face was serious, all the lightness of a few moments before wiped away. ‘Have I offended you?’

I shook my head. ‘I just think – we shouldn’t talk like that.’

‘I know.’ He sighed, his eyes holding mine. ‘And nothing’s going to happen. But I just wanted you to know something, Naomi.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Things aren’t great between me and Zee. I’d never cheat on her, but I – it helps to see someone else, sometimes, and forget about it all.’

‘Why are you…’ Voicing the thought felt terrible, like a betrayal of Zara. ‘I mean, if things aren’t great, why don’t you…?’

‘End it?’ he finished for me. ‘I can’t. What you said about trauma – there’s a lot of that in her past. She – it’s not my place to tell you, really.’

‘She what?’ I asked, dry-mouthed.

‘She tried… a few years back, when a relationship ended, to – you know. Harm herself.’

‘Oh no, Patch. That’s awful.’ I felt like another link had been added to the tangled chain that bound me to Zara. She was fragile, I knew, but it had never occurred to me that she might be suicidal, or had been in the past. I could never do anything that might trigger that again.

‘So you see,’ he went on, his eyes cast down, ‘I could never hurt her like that.’

‘I couldn’t, either,’ I agreed, feeling the knot in my stomach grow tighter.

He reached over and put his hand over mine. I felt the warm pressure, the rough skin at the base of his fingers. Then, after a second or two, he moved it away.

We finished our burgers, had more beer and more cocktails and didn’t talk about Zara again. By the end, we were giggly and silly, but we didn’t mention anything serious like feelings, and when we parted at the Tube station it was with a hug that felt almost brotherly.

That night in bed, I replayed every moment of the day, preserving the memory of everything he’d said, holding on to the knowledge that we’d done nothing wrong, nothing to betray Zara’s trust.

But the knowledge brought me no comfort – it was as bittersweet as the fading taste of vermouth on my tongue.

NINETEEN

It had been three weeks, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my meeting with Rowan. Of course, there’d been the bad stuff – the coolness and awkwardness there’d been between us, which had never been there before. And that coolness – that sense of distance – seemed to have extended to the rest of the group as well. The WhatsApp group, normally filled with a steady flow of chat from when the first of us woke up in the morning until the last of us turned out the light at night, was more silent now, less intimate somehow. Some days had always been busier than others, of course; some were quieter, with just quick ‘Hello’s and ‘Crazy busy, love you all’s. Now, however, my posts were often ignored for several hours at a time, then responded to with just a love heart or a thumbs-up.

I couldn’t suppress a fear that if my friends weren’t chatting on there, they might be chatting somewhere else. What if Rowan had been asking the others the same question she’d asked me – had we been wrong about Zara? I was certain that I hadn’t been wrong: that Zara’s reappearance in our lives would lead to more drama, more manipulation, more fall-outs. But then I had skin in the game. It was my actions that had triggered Zara the most, and now I was the one with the most to lose if my friends were to decide that, back in the past, they’d made the wrong decision – backed the wrong horse.

I felt stuck, wanting to know if something was going on behind my back, but also not wanting to know, hoping that whatever it was, it would all blow over and things would return to how they’d been before.

But I was also thinking about how I’d felt walking through town to meet Rowan. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d become some country mouse with hayseeds in my hair (okay, maybe a bit); I went into Central London a couple of times a month. But for some reason, that last time had awoken something in me that had been dormant before.

My vague intention to brush up my CV and start looking for a job had become a burning desire. Everything about that day – the Tube journey, the crowded streets, even the too-cold, under-seasoned salad, had made me long to have a job again, a purpose outside motherhood, a commute, a desk, colleagues to bitch to when things were going badly – the lot.

It won’t be like it was before, I reminded myself. You won’t be able to go to the pub after work for a few drinks on a Friday. Hell, people don’t even go to offices on Fridays any more. You’ll still have other responsibilities. You can’t turn back the clock.

But I didn’t care. After I’d dropped the children at nursery, I dug out my laptop, made myself a coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. The last time I’d looked at my CV had been six years ago, when I’d applied for the last job I’d got before the children were born. I logged on to LinkedIn for the first time in ages. To my surprise, I had a bunch of new notifications – people I’d worked with in the past wanting to connect with me, people endorsing me for skills, a handful mistaking me for another Naomi Hamilton who was apparently a shit-hot data analyst.

Lucky you, Other Naomi, I thought, deleting the messages. But I accepted the connection requests and updated my own profile, making sure to tag all my previous employers. I sent connection requests to a few old colleagues. Almost immediately, I found that the algorithm had sprung into action and begun recommending pages to me – law firms, recruitment agents, people I’d worked with whose names I could only just remember.

By the time I needed to pick up the twins, I’d been on there for hours. I felt I’d made progress, but I hadn’t achieved anything tangible yet. I didn’t even know whether I was going about things the right way. I should ask Kate, I thought. Kate spends half her life on LinkedIn. But something that would have felt totally normal a few weeks ago now seemed like an imposition, like asking a stranger for help rather than one of my best friends.

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